Hello I am thinking of getting a milksnake soon and i was thinking of raising some mice to fedd it. I am thinking of raising them outside in my garage and freezing them for at least the winter. My question is how many breeder mice would i use to produce food for one snake?
Reptile & Amphibian Forums
Welcome to kingsnake.com's message board system. Here you may share and discuss information with others about your favorite reptile and amphibian related topics such as care and feeding, caging requirements, permits and licenses, and more. Launched in 1997, the kingsnake.com message board system is one of the oldest and largest systems on the internet.
how many mice do I need?
scorpian5
Jul 31, 2003 09:18 PM
Replies (1)
Amanda E
Aug 01, 2003 09:59 AM
How often are you planning on feeding it? Is it a baby or an adult? If an adult, what size is it?
I tend to feed my snakes 1-2 small items until they are a year old. If you do this too, feeding every 4 days when they are babies and moving to every 5 days, and then every 6 days as they get older, I would guess you would need approx. 100-120 pinky/fuzzy mice for it's first year.
Because mice produce about 8 per litter, about every 21-28 days, that means you would need about 15 litters of mice, however, I would say 20 litters just to be safe.
To get this number of litters in a relatively short period of time (3 months) you would need 4-5 females. I would use 5 females to be safe. You could use a bin of 1.5, but some say that is too many females for 1 male. If you want, you could use 2 bins, 1 that is 1.2 and 1 that is 1.3.
If you don't mind breeding mice for an extended period of time, you could just use 1.2 mice.
But remember, mice don't live that long (less than a year when you breed them a lot), so you would have to take that into account and make sure you replace the breeder mice every once in a while.
(NOTE: I suck at math, so hopefully all of these calculations are right.)
